An Empirical Study of Benchmarking Marketing Efforts

Abstract

Shareholder value is non-negotiable in business. Marketing managers' should devise a marketing mix to create shareholder value. This work takes a modest attempt to devise and suggest a simplistic approach for managers of how to benchmark marketing efforts to maximise shareholder value. A quantitative research approach was taken into consideration. Four hypotheses were framed. Data on sales, advertising, and price were gathered from ten brands in a category over ten year. Thereafter, a hybrid regression model was fitted to data. Results reveal that the actual-points and the optimal-points of price and advertising are not equal in all nine cases in the pair-wise analyses. Findings of this research should guide managers to benchmark right price-point and right advertising-expenditures-point which indeed will maximise shareholder value of brand in question. This paper contributes to marketing because it highlights the role of marketing efforts in shareholder value creation and maximisation.